Objective

This book is not an attempt to teach beekeeping, but to say why the ZEST hive is a good choice to make for keeping bees. It remains a work in progress. When you are down the pub or at the bee association you can amaze your friends, comrades and the barmaid with your results. She may even want to take you home. 

They may all be less than totally believing about the honey you have collected, how disease free and easy your bees are to manage with their good temper, and at such little cost. They may begin to see you as a Walter Mitty fantasist. Tell them to get their own ZEST and prove it for themselves. 

As a beginner you will have been taught on the usual wood hives hearing the lessons that your teachers heard. As a thoughtful beekeeper you will realize the limitations. This will have been good experience as bad experience is the best you will get. It teaches you more. Better however to use someone else’s bad experience like that of the author. Beginners usually lose swarms from bad tempered colonies in their first year (I did), the remainder of which get disease in the winter (mine did). Many give up. Do not allow this to happen. The world needs ZEST beekeepers to save the planet, its ecosystem, put honey on toast and fruit in the bowl for the kids.

 Considerable sums of tax-payer’s money are spent on matters such as sequencing the genome of the bacteria that causes EFB. The Waggle Tail Dance and the hunt for a “hygienic” bee take up more. European money is tipped into a project that will monitor bees via a satellite link to the beekeepers living room. It is a puzzle to know just what the benefits of all this expenditure is except to keep scientists employed doing their Ph.d’s. and paying off their mortgages. While all his has been going on, my bees had been dying quietly and in quantity from Nosema during the winters. This was the principle cause of winter losses, in traditional hives, because Nosema flourishes in a cold, damp environment. We all know this. Much less money could be spent more effectively addressing the following more down to earth questions. Honey Bee Health Questions 

1. Does a teaspoon full of bleach in a gallon of sugar feed rid a queen and colony of Chalkbrood? 

2. Why did the incidence of AFB plunge when it did in the 60’s.? 

3. Why did the incidence of EFB rise precipitously in the 80’s........and in cold and damp summers? 

4. Why does varroa not collapse colonies in hot countries? 

5. Why has the tax payer paid £380,000 to the NBU on genetically sequencing the EFB bacteria when the knowledge has no obvious use? 

6. There is not a competent field test methodology that ascertains neonicotinoid damage on pollinators. Why not? 

7. Neonicotinoid is a neurotoxin. Can it be implicated in Dementia and Alzheimer. Has any science been done on the matter? 

8. Cold and damp weather in winter leads to bee colony deaths. Why is this? 

9. Are there detectable levels of Neonicotinoids in “Ambosia” bee feed, made from corn syrup and if so how much. 

10. What is/are the vector/s for the transmission of EFB between colonies. Diseases exacerbated or caused by cold and damp are as follows: 

1. Nosema – Thought to be caused by a virus, but latterly thought to be a fungus! It is known to be exacerbated by cold and damp hive conditions in winter. The removal of Fumidil B from the market which acted as a palliative for the disease may lead to more Nosema in our bee stocks. Prevention rather than cure has now been made compulsory. The solution is to make the bee environment warm and dry rather than cold and damp. 

2. CCD (Colony Collapse Disorder). The latest thinking on the cause is expressed in the BFA Bulletin of June 2010. It suggests that Nosema combines with a fungus to collapse the colony. 

SAN DIEGO, CA – May 25, 2010 -- New research from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) identifies a new potential cause for Colony Collapse Disorder in honeybees. A group of pathogens including a fungus and family of viruses may be working together to cause the decline. Scientists report their results today at the 110th General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in San Diego. 

There might be a synergism between two very different pathogens, says Jay Evans of the USDA Agricultural Research Service, a researcher on the study. When they show up together there is a significant correlation with colony collapse disorder.

 To better understand the cause of these collapses, in early 2007 Evans and his colleagues collected bees from both healthy and declining colonies across the country but primarily from California and Florida where most of the commercial pollination activity takes place. They have screened these samples and similar samples from each year since then for both known and novel pathogens. 

They found a slightly higher incidence of a fungal pathogen known as Nosema ceranae in sick colonies, but it was not statistically significant until they began pairing it with other pathogens. 

Levels of the fungus were slightly higher in sick colonies, but the presence of that fungus and 2 or 3 RNA viruses from the family Dicistroviridae is a pretty strong predictor of collapse, says Evans.

 Nosema are transferred between bees via the fecal-oral route. When a bee initially ingests the microbes and they get to the mid-gut, they harpoon themselves into the gut wall and live inside the epithelial cells there. Evans believes that the slightly higher numbers of the fungus somehow compromise the gut wall and allow the viruses to overwhelm the bees. In colonies with higher Nosema numbers they found virus levels to be 2-3 times greater than healthy colonies. 

While this is a working theory and they are still in the discovery phase looking for new pathogens, Evans and his colleagues are also actively looking for a way to boost bee defences against Nosema.

 

A way to protect against Nosema might be the key for now, says Evans. 

3. Acarine – Seen in the spring and also described as K-wing. It is caused by a tracheal mite. 

See Page 7 of “The Beekeepers Quarterly” No.95 March 2009 where John McMullan Ph.D of Trinity College Dublin writes on Page 7. 

“In sub-tropical regions of the world tracheal-mite infestation levels can be very high, but the colonies will not normally die. Only in regions with cool winters do deaths normally occur. It has only recently been identified (McMullan and Brown, Exp. Appl. Acoral., in press) that the mechanism causing death in tracheal-mite-infested colonies is the inability of the colonies to thermo-regulate”. 

Reducing the need to thermo-regulate may be the way forward, which will enable bees to live with the endemic tracheal mite and not be affected. 

4. Varroa – While this is not a disease, but a mite, it is the vector for enough diseases to collapse the hive if left untreated. In a climate that is cold in winter, into which varroa has moved as an alien species, its numbers appear to increase from mathematical stability to exponential expansion. The ZEST project included, during the 2010/2011 winter, an experiment in which 2 ZEST’s were heated to see the effect on the varroa population. Heat in winter may have reduced the varroa mite population from a killer to an acceptable nuisance. This was found to not be the case in tests of heated ZEST’s during 2011, but the method rather than the theory may only have been disproven. Strong circumstantial evidence remains which is described in the research chapter under “Varroa and the heated ZEST” that varroa is ambient temperature sensitive. 

5. Foul Brood – This is caused by a bacteria living in the cell containing the larva and which eats the larval food. The larva starves and dies. It decays, giving the characteristic foul smelling corpses. It seems to be a disease found more in heather areas which are on acid soil. This may eventually be proven to be the factor that in some other way encourages the bacteria or discourages the bee larva. It is unknown whether cold and damp exacerbates the disease, but its incidence increases in summers that are cold and damp as in the summer of 2012 The teaching apiary of the North Devon beekeeping association which also serves as the base for the experimental IHP group (Instrumented Hive Partnership) had a catastrophic outbreak of EFB in 2012. Out of 24 hives with colonies 20 had EFB. The four that did not were a WHB, a Langstroth, a ZEST hive (top entry) and an experimental wood hive converted to top entry. It may all have been coincidental that the two top entry hives both escaped the disease. Only more time and more ZESTs will show that mathematically the chances of ZESTs contracting EFB are less than in traditional hives. 

This book is primarily about bee health and how to improve it with a hive design that is less cold and damp. The disease problems caused by cold and damp is perceived by the author as being caused by the hive architecture. While dealing with that on bee health grounds it became apparent that traditional hives are a costly Victorian anachronism best replaced by the ZEST principles of habitation design. 

Cross top ventilation and bee entry in the ZEST directly removes damp, carbon dioxide laden air while maintaining the brood cluster temperature below. There is no flue/stack effect cooling the colony. The ZEST insulated external hive envelope also reduces the temperature difference between the inside and outside of the hive allowing the bees to thermo-regulate the brood more easily……..their prime ambition for colony survival. 

Readers can draw their own conclusions on this thesis. They may choose to switch to ZEST Hives, whether as a beginner or with experience, or to remain wedded to the existing technology and wood designs. While there continues to be no laws against cruelty to bees the choice remains yours…… No pressure. 

This is the statement, not about designing a better mousetrap, but a better beehive. This is the brief, but what constitutes better? It is doing “More with Less” using Design/Science. How can we get more honey…..and by implication……more pollination with less energy and materials, than we do at present? Once this broad objective is stated we cannot simply do a lot of pointing and instruct the bees to comply and provide. We need to gain a deep empathy with the bees to understand what makes them want to naturally co-operate in our ambition. The relationship is one of mutual co-operation. Our task is to provide good quality housing, a health service and food when there is famine. There is a school of thought in “natural beekeeping” that this includes letting bees succumb to “natural diseases” when we “unnatural humans” can prevent them doing so. We seem to have trouble accepting that we humans are also natural and deserving of space in the Universe together with our ambitions for bees. 

What honey bees want from the beekeeper, as far as possible is to be Warm and Dry and: 

a) Be disease, pest and parasite free

b) Behave naturally. 

c) Fill the Universe with their kind. 

d) Nurture their young at 35°C. 

e) Have adequate accessible food and water. 

f) Have a hive secure against weather and predators. 

g) Be kept busy doing productive things such as drawing wax. 

h) Not be overcrowded, but to have a compact brood nest. 

i) Be free of insecticides 

j) Have a prolific Queen, mainly found in her first year. 

k) Not to have pollen or honey blocks preventing the Queen laying eggs. If these wants are fulfilled the bees are unlikely to swarm, but will supersede. I invite you to accept that they think like us. Why would they want to vacate a fine dwelling that is easy to run and healthy for the kids. Most of these “bee wants” are not readily met with thin walled wood hives managed in the way that we do. If these wants are met the bees are quieter, harder working and better tempered as indeed we are when our needs are met. A detailed list of the wood hive deficiencies is included in Chapter 3. 

What beekeepers want from the bees is for them to: 

a) Be productive, making a surplus of honey for harvesting. 

b) Be good tempered. 

c) Be disease free. 

d) Pollinate crops.  

 

 

Objective Click here      Research Click here